Imagine asking one of your classes a deep, but deceptively-simple, question. Have them judge each others’ answers anonymously, give their reasons for the judgements, then assess the reasons as well. At the end of the process you get a mark. Automatically.
No exercise books, no late-night marking sessions. Just high-quality formative assessment. Empowered, gamified, peer-supported learning that just works.
Now imagine running this lesson with an Ofsted inspector in your classroom. Think they’d be impressed? So do I.
So you can try SPA for yourself, I have created this set of demonstration exercises you can assign to your students. It costs nothing so give it a go.
Here are a few examples of SPA questions. Add your own!
- You are a serf in a Norman village. Describe your day.
- Where would you rather live – Singapore or Dubai? Why?
- How could you use a barometer to determine the height of a tower?
- Why can a cheetah run faster than a gazelle?
- Explain why metals are sometimes defined as plasmas.
- How would you measure the volume of a dog?
SPA is a technology we patented several years ago and have been quietly working on ever since. This is the first time we’ve had it available in the main Yacapaca interface.
Start here
Sometimes kids get hold of the wrong end of the stick en masse. A great example is copyright – the right to copy. A quick sampling of students’ peer feedback statements reveals that approx. 50% of statements that mention copyright see it as some kind of a crime. Here’s a quick sampler of the 20+ most recent examples:
